Dereliction—Colours of Abandonment Our latest photography expeditions are being compiled – just in time for Exposure Festival in February. Dereliction is an eye on things abandoned: ignored, forgotten, forlorn, fading away, dismissed by our modern predilection for everything new. Following the Ghost Town Trail along obsolete railroads: from Tiny to Biggar, Eastend to Westbend, Smuts […]

Don’t let the bed springs bite! And if they do, just grab a camera, and shoot some black and blue. Reflected gold helps warm up the bed with a sparkle of sunlight. Just some beautiful old detritus stashed away at the Sandon Ghost Town scrap metal dealership. West Kootenay, BC.

“There are no roads here” (Corb Lund)… Nearly everywhere else on the Alberta map is criss-crossed by right-of-ways surveyed every mile east/west, every two miles north/south. These two empty townships of wild aspen parkland and native prairie grasslands are the Rumsey Natural Area and Environmental Reserve – hummocky moraine left behind by retreating continental ice […]

Ghost Truck Phantom 309 corroding away at the Sandon Ghost Town. A truly fitting location to encounter an apparition of the legend of Big Joe and Phantom 309, from Tom Waits “Nighthawks at the Diner” tribute to Red Sovine, written by Tommy Faile. Courtesy of a mysterious scrap metal dealer deep in the foreboding Selkirk […]

Blown ashore during a violent storm, the Brockton II is ship wrecked on McLoughlin Bay, near the private wharf at Bella Coola, BC. A well equipped foreign photographer arrived at the scene too, but he was actually looking for bears! (Tourists?!) Clambering down amongst the rubble, barnacles, mussel shells, and stinking muck, I focused up […]

Travel guides feature a photo of this world famous safe with a backdrop of the Sandon Ghost Town and Selkirk Mountains. Hills riddled with more mine shafts per acre than anywhere else in British Columbia. You’d never know how interestingly beautiful this old, rusted out, gold safe really is, looking at those travel pictures. An […]

Behind our Ashburton lodging grew a potato patch. Behind the potato patch withered a row of little old cars. The land owner had erected a flash new Quonset to showcase his bright, shiny, restored car collection. I left a note on the locked gate. The spud grower phoned, and through his rather muddy accent, said […]

Near Wanaka is the little Otago crossroads of Luggate, where Church Road deaks off to the famous Red Bridge. Travel guide pictures of the landmark abound, so I didn’t need to stop. Line up some junked old trucks, on the other hand… Battered, bent, and broken accident victims, banished to the empty lot, forlorn and […]

World War II defense for Lyttelton Harbour/Whakaraupo was established at Godley Heads gun emplacements. Twisting and exposed, it was a treacherous haul across the volcanic Port Hills to Christchurch. Warning shots were never fired, and the Big Guns were never actually installed before the war ended. Incurring considerable damage during the recent earthquakes, much of […]